Introduction: The CAB service and human rights
 Human Rights Inquiry ( 110kb)
Citizens Advice provides free, independent, confidential and impartial advice to everyone on their rights and responsibilities, though a network of 420 bureaux providing quality assured services in over 3,000 locations throughout England and Wales. The CAB service values diversity, promotes equality and challenges discrimination. In 2007-2008 the CAB service dealt with 5.5 million problems in total, including benefits, consumer issues, employment and housing.
Our approach is that equality, diversity, and human rights are inextricably linked: we are all different or diverse, and yet we all share a common, equal humanity. In providing advice and promoting equality, we focus on people’s right to equal treatment in law and in practice, challenging injustice and discrimination.
Many of the problems that bureaux deal with can potentially engage convention rights, for example:
- In 2007-2008 bureaux dealt with 79,296 problems related to immigration, asylum and nationality issues – approximately 21% of these concerned nationality and citizenship, 27% family, dependents & partners, and 15% refugees and asylum seekers.
- CABx dealt with over 73,846 heath and community care enquiries; 12% of enquiries concern services for people with mental health problems, and 34 % relate to residential or community care issues.
- In 2007-2008 bureaux handled 274,814 enquiries relating to legal issues. A third of these of these concerned court proceedings.
- Bureaux currently handle over 22,000 discrimination advice enquiries every year. The majority of these concern sex, disability and race discrimination, although the numbers of discrimination enquiries relating to age, religion and belief, and sexual orientation are growing.
Citizens Advice welcomes this inquiry, as we believe that further progress is needed in building a human rights and sustaining a human rights culture across society. It is a common misconception about human rights that they are relevant only to people living under or fleeing repressive regimes in other countries, and are mainly concerned with torture or the grossest kinds of cruelty and ill-treatment. In fact, human rights are equally relevant at an individual and community level underpinning many aspects of everyday life, and are rooted in the affirmation of every person's individual dignity and worth. As ten years have now passed since the Human Rights Act was enacted, it is an opportune moment to review how far social institutions have come in building a human rights culture, and the approach of public authorities in implementing a human rights framework.
Summary of key issues
The human rights framework cuts across all areas of public service delivery and provides important protection for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups. The CAB service is in an ideal position to recognise these issues, because many of our clients have poor basic skills, speak English as a second language, live in poverty, suffer financial hardship, experience some form of discrimination because of race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, disability, have disability or health problems, have offended or be at risk of offending, and experience difficulty in accessing services. For bureaux, human rights can therefore be an important lever to help empower vulnerable groups.
The UK has a strong human rights record and a strong tradition of fairness in legal and administrative decisions. However, increasing use of automated systems in service delivery, the application of blanket policies without discretion, poor customer service, and misunderstanding about how human rights principles can be used to enhance service design and decision-making can sometimes leave people short changed on their rights, especially those from minority communities or vulnerable groups or where individuals have particular needs. There remains significant scope for improvement in respecting people’s human rights when designing the delivery systems for providing public services. As the Human Rights Act makes clear, legislation, policies and procedures must not only be designed to avoid breaches of human rights, but also to give positive effect to human rights.
Human rights advocacy is not a specialist service offered by CABx, but human rights principles underpin what we do in providing free and independent holistic advice, and using the experiences of our clients to lobby to improve services, policies and practices. In this context, our submission draws attention to the following problems which raise interlocking issues often under several convention articles and other human rights instruments.
- Detention - Prison and detention authorities sometimes fail to make provision for prisoners’ rights and particular needs, for example pregnant prisoners and the babies of women prisoners.
- Asylum and immigration - The system of asylum support needs to be kept under continual review to ensure that policies are compliant with human rights standards. CABx regularly come across cases where failed asylum seekers are left destitute.
- Family rights and housing - Support for victims of domestic violence, especially from housing authorities and the legal aid system, is frequently inadequate to the point of knowingly leaving victims in danger. Services need to be more responsive to situations in which personal safety and security are at a high level of risk. We are also concerned about insufficient protection of housing rights, and the impact of this on the right to family life.
- Care standards - Vulnerable people in the care system – bureaux come across situations in which poor decisions and care standards endanger life, and seriously compromise personal dignity and family relationships.
- Access to rights - Some rights quite rightly actively push states towards adopting free access policies towards services identified as important by the European Convention (e.g. education, justice); however such access is seriously compromised by many of the additional costs borne by service users. For example, many people are excluded from a fair legal process by the lack of free representation in most discrimination cases.
Terms of Reference
The terms of reference of the inquiry are:
- To assess progress towards the effectiveness and enjoyment of a culture of respect for human rights in Great Britain.
- To consider how the current human rights framework might best be developed and used to realise the vision of a society built on fairness and respect, confident in all aspects of its diversity.
During the initial consultation on the scope and terms of reference for this review, we expressed concern that the terms of reference are extremely broad, and that the aims of the review may need to be further broken down either by sector or the types of rights engaged – especially as this inquiry process is taking place under the Commission’s powers to initiate formal inquiries under section 16 of the Equality Act 2006.
The Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) and the principles underpinning it, are of course a reasonable starting point for any discussion on the state of human rights in the UK; however, to date no major research has been conducted into the ways in which the Human Rights Act is being used beyond the courtroom in the UK. The Human Rights Insight Project attempted some analysis of whether human rights could be used empirically as a tool to improve the public’s experiences of public services; it found that information on the application of human rights to public service delivery was not easily available.1
The second problem with pinning the inquiry to the “substantive rights” under the Human Rights Act is that this legislation only applies to citizen transactions with public authorities, and not individuals’ transactions with businesses. There are many areas beyond public service delivery where the potential of the Human Rights Act – and human rights more generally – remains largely untapped in the UK. In particular vulnerable consumers, or consumers with special needs can face particular risks such as exploitation by rogue traders, detrimental treatment by essential services providers, or mistreatment by private carers. Consequently, a key policy challenge is how commercial providers of public, essential and consumer services, and their regulators, can ensure that their service standards incorporate notions of basic rights and fair treatment for customers. These standards need to be built in both to procurement policies with the public sector, and also into applicable codes and quality monitoring regimes such as utilities service obligations, private care homes, social housing providers, enforcement industry standards and financial services regulation.
Finally, we are concerned that the continued exclusion of economic, social and cultural rights from the legal framework is a disappointment; as the Joseph Rowntree Trust points out discrimination against people on the grounds of poverty is a common but unacknowledged feature of life in the UK and the lack of socio-economic rights within our legal framework prevents discussion on combating poverty on the basis on the human rights values and principles.2 The UK does however have a robust legislative regime for combating discrimination and in promoting equality including specific duties on public authorities. By way of contrast, human rights principles have a more general application and one of the useful roles for human rights is in ‘filling the gaps’ where vulnerable or disadvantaged groups may be without legal protection. We would therefore like to see the human rights framework developed as a way of strengthening existing regulatory or legal protection regimes.
Substantive rights in England and Wales
Our main general concern is that the existing human rights framework is very poorly understood. Low levels of awareness and misconceptions about human rights in the community mean that people may not perceive their problem or complaint as a ‘human rights issue’. The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights concluded that the Government has done 'nowhere near enough' to use the Human Rights Act to improve the delivery of public services and has allowed a catalogue of myths to build up around the true purpose and use of the Act in the UK.3 People’s understanding of their rights and possible remedies is limited; and as yet there is little awareness of the CEHR or what it will do. Recent initiatives in public legal education have demonstrated that low levels of legal literacy contribute to mis-perceptions of human rights.4 And as the IPPR have suggested, insufficient capacity within the voluntary sector to develop human rights advocacy is one of the reasons that the HRA regime is seen more as blunt instrument of litigation than a vehicle for social change and development.5
This presents a pressing challenge to the advice sector, and the CAB service is piloting a pro-active programme to train a number of advisers on using human rights principles in policy and campaigning work. However there is an urgent need to be able to roll this pilot out across the service and ensure that all bureaux are equipped to use the human rights framework as a tool for influencing public decision-makers. We can also use our evidence database to identify problem clusters where human rights issues are most likely to be engaged and to raise these issues with policy makers. However, our evidence base does not give us a comprehensive picture on the state of human rights because of the nature of the work of the CAB service. Given these limitations the remainder of our submission focuses on issues where we have particular concerns from bureaux evidence with reference to each of the key convention rights.
Human Rights Inquiry ( 110kb)
1. Human Rights Insight Report. Ministry of Justice 2008
2. Discrimination on grounds of poverty, JRT briefing 2007
3. JCHR – Sixth Report: The Work of the Committee in 2007 and the State of Human Rights in the UK
4. Public Legal Education and Support (PLEAS) Taskforce Report, Ministry of Justice 2007
5. Human Rights, Who needs them IPPR 2004
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